La divulgazione della musica d’arte in RAI-TV negli anni Sessanta

Abstract

This article provides an overview on the ways in which musical knowledge has been popularized by the Rai-TV public broadcasting network in the 1960s, namely the period of time from the last last years of the economic boom to the aftermath of 1968. In the decade under scrutiny,  the television offer of the National channel and of the Second channel (the only two existing channels at the time) had a rather clear, distinctive profile, as a result of the management of Ettore Bernabei, who was Rai’s general director from 1961 to 1974. Those were the years of the so-called ‘paleo-tv’, which was characterized by a strongly educational mission. Besides elucidating the educational goals of paleo-tv,  both in general and in relation to art music, the article describes and discusses a couple of programs that had an educational and popularizing purpose, in particular Roman Vlad’s Specchio sonoro (1964) and the series L’opera ieri e oggi, by Luciano Alberti and Vittoria Ottolenghi, which were part of the daily section Sapere (1969).